7 October 2022 Endless Friday

[KathyB]

This day is going by sooooooooo slooooooooowwwwwwwwlllllllyyyyyyyy. I guess if I had to pick one day of the week to last a long time, Fridays would be near the top of the list, but still....

[scenicdesign71]

Yep, mine was like that too.

I spent three quarters of the day puttering through a couple of small projects in the shop (painting two wooden grilles, each roughly 3' x 5', to look like antiqued brass; painting and aging a four-foot strip of wood with coat-hooks to match the very heavily-aged wall on which it was to be mounted, just outside a prison holding cell).

Then, with an hour or two remaining, I ventured onto one of our stages to help with a sizable new set: a basement café/bar with a low beamed ceiling; walls of unpainted brick, painted rough plaster, and painted wood wainscoting; and a linoleum "stone" floor suggesting oversized terrazzo -- all so dark in color (and likely dimly-lit to boot) that I'm dubious whether any of these nice design choices will ever show onscreen.  I had been curious about how this set was coming along; I'd worked on it earlier in the week when it was mostly raw wood, prepping it for texture and awaiting final color choices.  But I'd also been happy to stay away from it for most of the day yesterday, figuring that by then, with a deadline looming (it shoots on Monday night, so the dressers will need it done and ready to furnish that day) it would be a bit of a clusterfuck -- which in fact it was.  Fortunately I only ended up staying there, helping to stain the large and elaborate wooden bar itself, for a little over an hour as the electricians wanted to turn off the lights and go home at 4pm, voiding any of the other crews' plans to stay for an extra hour.  (With five or six of us working on it, we were actually able to stain the entire front bar and almost all of the back bar in just about an hour, though it'll still need a satin varnish and some aging).

Such was my grumpiness yesterday that every aspect of every project I was given to work on seemed to me wrong-headed, disorganized and ill-prepared.  After thinking (as of about 3:30) that we'd be staying until 5pm, the about-face (at 3:50) to 4pm instead was the day's one piece of good news.